American Ultra-movie reviewAugust 22, 2015

Movie ReviewAugust 21, 2015 American Ultra by Mark Roget The stars, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, make for a compelling duo in American Ultra, but their acting talent is totally wasted in the cartoonish isn’t-violence-fun film. Indeed, there is more blood in this film than one would find in a dozen hospital operating rooms. It’s not bad enough that the gory bloodbath is gag inducing, but director Nima Nourizadeh goes one disgusting step forward by trying to make the gut-wrenching bloody violence comedic (at the presentation I saw, no one in the audience was laughing). The carnage-as-hilarity film begins with a gaunt, bruised, and stoned Mike Howell (Eisenberg) who is sitting in jail. Of course, we’re curious as to why he’s handcuffed and incarcerated, and so the movie immediately flashes back to what led to Howell’s imprisonment. Howell spends a lot of time doodling a comic-strip monkey while he works at night in a food mart in a rural West Virginia town. He’s a skinny, long-haired, glassy-eyed, soft-spoken youth who talks, looks, and walks like a loser; but his girlfriend, Phoebe Larson (Stewart) seems to love him no matter his many panic attacks, lack of education, and dopey demeanor. It really stretches credibility to find out that the skinny kid has the strength to take on a slew of muscled assailants with only a spoon and soup; but it’s even more difficult to believe that Howell is actually a sleeper CIA-trained killing agent who has no inkling of how he obtained his special skills. Moreover, we don’t understand why Phoebe has been pretending to be someone she’s not.

The action then goes into high gear when field agent (Connie Britton) shows up to help, and power-hungry CIA chief, Adrian Yates (Topher Grace) decides to get rid of Howell. Yates wants to remove all traces of Howell from the super agency, which devoted itself to the creation and training of spies and killers. Yates orders his thuggish underlings to get rid of Howell, but suddenly the amnesiac recalls his specialized training and he wastes anyone who tries to take him out. As the film continues, Howell wastes lots and lots of people. Written with a smarmy nihilism by Max Landis, the script offers a sadistic story that relishes the many ways there are to inflict deadly pain, rip off body parts, and splatter a torrent of blood on the cinematic screen. It appears that Landis and Nourizadeh get a kick out of coming up with imaginative ways of using everyday objects to inflict the most grisly slaughter.

Adding to the black comedy are some cardboard caricatures that are supposed to be amusing because they’re stupid, low-life vicious, and appallingly degenerate. For instance, there is Rose, the local drug dealer (John Leguizamo), who rattles off street-speak so fast that we can hardly make out what he’s saying; and then there’s the hired killers, whose missing teeth make him look like a drooling vampire with a mouth dripping with blood. This is supposed to be a riot of laughs. Eisenberg and Stewart are such serious and fine actors that one wonders what possessed them to use their talent in this third-rate piece of disgusting, degrading, destructive horror that has no redeeming value whatsoever. Maybe the dumb mindlessness of isn’t cruelty-a-blast movies such as American Ultra explains why so many today are oblivious to the bloody terrorist depravity that is taking place in real-life, right now, in places all over the world.